Change you can't believe in: This past Tuesday North Dakotans decided that property taxes were in but a traditional school nickname was out. It's yet another case of maintaining all the wrong parts of the status quo.

In response to depleted revenues and high labor costs, the head of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) asserted Tuesday that the cash-strapped mail agency has become a little like Greece, and that congressional lawmakers must approve a restructuring plan if it has any chance of returning to profitability. “If we don’t do something about the costs of this organization, we are going to look … like Greece,” U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe charged. “People laugh when I say that, but it’s true.”

The FBI has announced that violent crime dropped nationwide in 2011, but a closer analysis of the data, according to 24/7 Wall Street, shows that violent crime in the most dangerous American cities is worsening. “A 24/7 Wall St. review of 2011 FBI crime data,” the website reported, “shows that violent crime rose in more than half of the cities that have among the highest rates in the country. In seven of the 10 cities, murder rates increased. In eight of the 10, burglary went up.”

Following the announcement last Thursday by Senator Rand Paul that he was endorsing former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as the Republican Party’s nominee for President, he took time to respond to critics of that decision in an interview with Peter Schiff.

A human-rights group that monitors Communist China’s policy of forced abortion on couples not adhering to its one-child policy has reported that on June 3 a Chinese woman who was seven months pregnant was taken from her home by the country’s population police and had her baby forcibly aborted.

In efforts to intimidate and suppress the speech of prominent conservative bloggers, opponents are implementing a decade-old technique called “SWAT-ing,” which involves prank callers phoning law-enforcement authorities and reporting a violent crime at someone’s home. The pranksters generally camouflage their actual phone numbers — by making them appear to originate from the victim’s home — leading SWAT teams to be dispatched to a person’s residence.

The debate incited by Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to outlaw supersized sodas in New York misses an important point. In the mayor’s words, “We’re not taking away anybody’s right to do things. We’re simply forcing you to understand that you have to make the conscious decision to go from one cup to another cup.” (Emphasis added.)

On Tuesday the Treasury Department announced that in May the federal government received tax revenues of $180.7 billion, the second highest for the month of May in history. Unfortunately, the government spent $305.3 billion, leaving a deficit of $124.6 billion. So far this year, deficits are at $844.5 billion and are on track to exceed $1 trillion for the fiscal year, the fourth year in a row.

Talks with Pakistan over the end of an embargo on supply routes through that nation have broken down over U.S. refusal to apologize for the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers killed by an American airstrike.

After overcoming an attempted sandbagging by members of the Republican leadership, at about nine o’clock Tuesday night, the House of Representatives of Rhode Island overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for the repeal of the indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012.